The urbanities.Osaka and the concept of urbanity in culturally diverse contexts

Darko RadovicFaculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

What is city? That seemingly simple question, of course, defies all attempts at an answer. Citiesare the most representative products of human civilisation, they are the true reflections of thecomplex web of social relations, times and rhythms onto the specific place – and, thus,essentially undefinable.

Definitions focused at the essence, at what makes cities cities, often use term urbanity. Inhis discussions of the urban, broadly enough, Spengler wrote about the soul of the city. Hisvagueness might not help the pragmatists in their search for a rigorous definition, but hisattempt comes closest to that elusive, undefinable - something.

In a globalised world we are becoming aware that definitions of urbanity have to be asculture-specific as the cities are. That they all have their own urban cultures, their souls, theirvery own urbanities. That adds another, necessary and long overdue, level of complexity to theissue.

Our current research focuses on understanding of urbanity in several cities of the West(Mediterranean and Continental Europe) and the East (East and South-East Asia). A numberacademics, urban planners, urban designers, architects, engineers and policy-makers involved inthe shaping of Belgrade, Barcelona, Bangkok and Osaka answered a simple questionnaire. Theresults offer insights into the ways in which the experts see urbanity of their cities and of theircultures, a view into how those cities and those cultures see themselves. Of particular interest tous was the emerging notion of uniqueness of urbanity of cities in culturally diverse contexts and plurality of corresponding definitions. That provides a specific focus of this paper. In orderemphasise urbanity of the other we focus at the city of Osaka. As our project is still in progress,a number of open-ended conclusions are an invitation for discussion.

1d.radovic@unimelb.edu.au

1 Places and cultures of Midosuji Dori

Even a casual visitor to Osaka would be familar with its grand boulevard. Midosuji Dori, a fourthousand and five hundred meters long main street connects key central areas of the city, theKita (North) and the Minami (South) and acts as a true urban axis. Its name refers to theimportant South and North Mido temples, which are located at the Western side of theBoulevard.

The grand boulevard of Osaka was completed in 1937, as part of an ambitiousComprehensive Osaka Urban Plan advocated by the then professor at Hitotsubashi University,Seki Hajime (1873–1935). Professor Seki served the city of Osaka as deputy Mayor from 1914until his death in 1935. He saw cities as “social subjects”, “vital organs” of the peoples’ nationaleconomy and not, as landowners and bureaucrats did, as a mere economic phenomenon(Hanes, 2002). His plan included development of infrastructure (canals, sewers, parks andcemeteries) as well as construction of a splendid promenade. It was an effort to transformOsaka, in Seki’s own words, from a “Capital of Smoke” to a “Livable City”, to improve thequality of urban life. The Midosuji project was, in its context, comparable with the best streetsconceived by Haussman or Cerda. Some call it the Champs Elysees of Osaka.

The Boulevard can be seen as a single place. Its unitary identity comes from a coherentoverall morphology and a number of built-in unifying elements. For instance, nine hundredginko trees adore its pavements and add a very special nuance of cultural contextualisation,making the street distinctly Japanese and of Osaka (ginko is the official Prefectural tree).Twenty-two sculptures donated by the companies housed along Midosuji Dori provide an air ofhighly urbane culture. Elegant western style buildings constructed during the Meiji and Taishoperiod and old merchants’ houses of Senba district (which were lucky to survive an almost totaldestruction during the savage bombings in 1945) provide an appropriate stage for lively urbanactivity.

Nonetheless, it would not take long for our superficial visitor to recognise the unitarycharacterisation of the main street of Osaka as insufficient. Midosuji Dori is strongly influencedby European urbanism, but it is much more than a mere cultural import. It still reflects all theambiguities of the times of its conception, an era of complex dialectics between the Taisho“catching-up” with the West and the growing auto-orientalism of a frustrated, pre-war society(Befu, 2001). It also accurately mirrors the dilemmas of contemporary Japan. Along its longstretch the street character changes in response to the adjoining areas, which range from themajor railway station and business districts to fashionable entertainment and shoppingprecincts. The immediate hinterland colours Midosuji Dori with spatial and behavioural patternsthat are all but Western.

The resulting quality of Midosuji Dori is, therefore, composite and complex. The Boulevardis simultaneously a single place and a system of places of very distinct characters and cultures.Those separate, fragmented identities are nourished by histories and life of the side streets,lanes, canals and adjoining precincts. Downtown Kita around the Umeda Station; downtownMinami with Shisaibashi and Namba districts; Dotonbori-dori; neon lights reflected in theDotonbori-gawa; nearby amusement quarters of Minami; arcaded Shinsaibashi street, thelargest shopping area of Osaka; major department stores; the European Village; the AmericanVillage and its trend-conscious young people - they are all spatially identifiable, they all possessstrong individual identities and, at the same time, they all play significant roles in the definitionof the quality of a higher order – one orchestrated by the Boulevard. Midosuji Dori grew into akey ordering urban element of central Osaka. Its distinctive urban form is critical part ofcognitive maps of both new acquaintances of Osaka and the locals.

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Illustration 1 The 1929 map –Introduction of Midosuji Dori intothe dense urban tissue

Illustration 2 Field of forces that make urbanity of centralOsaka today, held together by the North-South axis ofMidosuji Dori

During our recent investigation of public spaces of Osaka we asked a very special group oflocals - academics and graduate students in disciplines that focus at production of space - toidentify places which constitute and best reflect urban essence of Osaka. The resulting expertview confirms above-defined importance of Midosuju Dori. Although not many of theparticipants in our inquiry explicitly named the Boulevard as the place, their mapping of placescritical for experiencing and understanding of Osaka’s toshisei outlines a zone clearly heldtogether by the cohesive and communicative forces of Midosuji Dori (Illustrations 1 and 2).

We can conclude that Midosuji Dori is a single place, the character of which is stronglydefined by its Western origins; at the same time it is a sophisticated system of places deeplyrooted in the local cultures of Japan, Osaka and even the tiniest of its precincts.

2 Layered identities

Osaka is much older and larger than Midosuji Dori. Its history was critical for development ofthose many local cultures that so strongly mark the present identity of the Boulevard. Theoldest archaeological findings point at the Jomon era (10,000-300 b.C.), while first writtenmention of the region dates back to the early eight century. Yamato was the birthplace ofJapan. In their authoritative overview of the history of Osaka, McClain and Wakita (McClean,1999) explain that, in the early Middle Ages place called Naniwa, mainly because of itsconvenience as a harbour, attracted various activities. That provided an urbogenetic sparkle. By“the middle of the 7th century, the port of Naniwa became Naniwakyo, Japan’s first imperialcapital” and what was “probably the first community in Japan to be laid out in accordance withChinese precedents of orthogonal urban design” (ibid., p.3).

The name Osaka was first mentioned in 1496, in a reference to the chapel “on Ikutamamanor, at a place called Osaka” (ibid., p.9). The construction of the Osaka Castle was anultimate recognition of its importance. When in the 1580s Hideyoshi Toyotomi moved into theOsaka Castle, he encouraged many of the Kyoto’s leading Buddhist institutions to follow hisexample and give religious legitimacy to the joka machi – the city below the castle. By the timeof the warlord’s death in 1598, Osaka was an established city of merchants and artisans, in sizeand importance “perhaps second only to Kyoto in all of Japan” (ibid., p.15). It grew very quicklyinto one of the Three Metropoles of Japan. When McClean and Wakita stress that Osaka “wasnot Kyoto and it was not Edo” that must be understood in two ways: rightly - that Osaka wasthe third among tree capitals, but also that it had an already developed urban character – aparticular kind of “Osaka personality”, attributable not only of its inhabitants, but also to thecity itself.

Early Japanese cities were never completely built as planned (Bognar, 1990, p.15). That mayexplain an unorthodox, East-West orientation of the grid of Osaka. It was determined more bythe rivers and the sea then by geomantic rules of Chinese urbanism. To the East was the OsakaCastle; to the West of the Uemachi Plateau were government buildings and the port, and thegrid of streets and canals extended to connect those two precincts. Today, the East-Westdirection has lost its communicative importance, but it still plays an important part in bothphysical structure and mythology of the city. It was immortalised in some of the cornerstones oflocal culture, such as The Love Suicide at Amijima, by Chikamatsu Monzaemon (Chikamatsu,1953). His tragic lovers walked upstream, from the pleasure quarters, along the banks of theriver and Nakanoshima island – to die together and thus honour their impossible love. Suchstories often preserve places better than the stone walls could.

Like the Chinese capitals, Osaka did not have a centre. Like all Japanese medieval castletowns, it did not have any fortifications. Numerous temples were located at its outskirts for,

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besides their primary use, defensive purpose. “Such features prompted Terunobu Fujimori tocompare Japanese cities to cabbages, wrapped in soft, protective layers, and Western cities toeggs, encased in hard shells. To further clarify the underlying issues, Shuji Takashuna aptlypointed out that ‘whereas Westerners tend to view space in a unified and convergent manner,that is, in terms of a discrete, organized whole, the Japanese see it in a pluralistic, divergentmanner, in terms of numerous interconnecting fragments” (Bognar, 1990, p.16).

Midosuji Dori was a conscious effort to introduce Western “order” into the “chaos” of anAsian city. Seki Hajime’s grand project reorientated urban structure of Osaka to connect theexisting nucleus of urban activity at the river with the prosperous monzen machi, or town infront of the gate, which centuries ago “grew up at the approach to Sumiyoshi Shrine andanother at the temple complex of Shitennoji” (McClean, 1999, p.6). His gesture was as much aconscious recognition of the old, as it was a brave introduction of the new. Midosuji Doriremains strongly local and of Osaka, as it is global and of the World.

The identity of Osaka is layered. Its urban culture includes layers of the past and thepresent, physical spaces and ephemeral rhythms, buildings and patterns of use that define andframe the (central) Osaka of today. That multiplicity is simultaneously global and local. It isglobal at the basic conceptual level, Lefebvrian conçu (Sheilds, 1999). Both East-West and North-South directions of urban development were inspired by foreign ideologies – by China and bythe West. At the concrete levels of urban space and appropriation, the city grew (veçu) into adistinctly local, Japanese quality. Even if not always in superlatives (eg. Kerr, 1996), Osaka has tobe described as a truly Japanese city.

The Japaneseness of urban from (perçu) was the topic of many studies and publications.The most commonly expressed view is summarised in Botond Bognar’s comparison of Japanesecities with the text: “The evolution of the urban environment in Japan indicates that the city iscreated, perceived, and understood as an additive texture (text?) wherein preference is given tothe parts (or episodes) in a network of independent places; the whole (or the story) as anaggregate or incomplete form, remains elusive, to be conjured up only in the memory andimagination of the perceiver. As typified best by Tokyo, the Japanese city has neither thestructural clarity of European cities. Instead, it has grown up in a pleat-like, irregular wayaround a number of nuclei or, as Vladimir Krstic remarked, ’it has developed with no apparentconcept of its totality’” (ibid., p.16).

Osaka possesses all the dramatic difference to the usual Western spatiality summarised byBerque (1997a). Yet, being profoundly Japanese it does not fail to also be distinctly - Osaka. Itsuniqueness among the Japanese cities is proverbial. Locals elevate that difference to their majorsource of pride; on the other hand, others often ridicule the very same “Osaka character”.

What matters to us here is that Osaka does possess a distinct urban culture reflected in itsspaces, their form and patterns of use. The clue for definition of that culture cuts across threedistinctive layers – cosmopolitan, national and local. The local layers provide the finest nuancesof cultural difference, even within their most immediate contexts.

3 The urbanity of Osaka

Probably the critical force behind the cultural specificity of Osaka dates back to the time of thefoundation of the city and stems from the original reason for settlement – commerce. Japanhad two clearly defined types of culture - “one was the culture of Kamigata (the ‘upper region’,the area including Kyoto and Osaka); the other was the culture of the city of Edo. (Since theearly times) Kyoto continued to have an elite aristocratic cultural community. By contrast, theculture of Edo centered on a far larger upper-class warrior stratum” (Nishiyama, 1997), while

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Osaka developed a distinctly different cultural charge, one provided by the class ofentrepreneurial merchants.

Therefore, the “vulgar” culture of Osaka has strong class roots. In the beginning that wasnot very helpful. Historically, commerce was not highly regarded in Japan. The Tokugawa rulersdistinguished four social classes: “First the samurai, in some thirty-one gradations; then thepeasants; next ‘below’ them on the scale, craftsmen; and finally, at the bottom of the socialstructure, the merchant class, whose ‘money grubbing’ and greedy nature was despised anddowngraded in the increasingly Confucianized Tokugawa ordering of society” (King, 1993, p.57).

From the beginning “Osaka was a city not of samurai, but of merchants (chonin, literally‘townspeople’)” (Hunter, 1991, p. 86). Over the time “merchants sought outlets for their wealthand desire for influence within the system. They found ways of evading the restrictivesumptuary laws. They fostered the development of a new, urban, cultural tradition” (McClean,1999). Since the Middle Ages, initially to please their rulers, the merchants of Osaka hadinvested in public projects. When “Matsudaira began the reurbanisation of Osaka by enticingthe commoners who fled during the battles 1614-15 to come back to the city. … (he) initiatedwhat became a regular government policy of cooperating with wealthy merchant families todredge out a network of canals and waterways to transport good conveniently and cheaply intoand around the community” (ibid., p.50). Canals and bridges became the most distinguishingfeatures of urban structure and life. In a fashion unique to Japan, some of the major bridgesand canals still celebrate not their location, but the names of those who donated them to thecity – such as the famous Yodoya family and their major bridge over the Tosoborigawa,Yodoyabashi.

Very early on, the commercial activity promoted Osaka into the “‘country’s kitchen’ becauseit was a major consumption center, a city of perhaps four hundred thousand persons in the1620s and 1630s, and was located at the primary nodal point conjoining the rivers and coastalshipping routes that had constituted the arteries of commerce in the economically advancedKinai region from the medieval period … The establishment within Osaka of the Three GreatMarkets provided physical evidence of the city’s emergence as the leading urban consumptioncenter in Western Japan” (ibid., p. 56).

Many other features of Osaka’s development strengthened urban aspect of its identity. Thecity did not sprawl, but grew denser. By the 1620s “most of the newcomers to Osaka builthomes or moved into appartment-style dwellings located west of the castle, filling up the areafamiliarly known as Senba, originally opened to settlement in 1598 …”. An increased densitymeant higher complexity of urban governance. “The shogunate acted quickly to developprocedures to govern and police … Appointed on a regular basis from 1619, the two citymagistrates issued legal codes, dispensed justice, collected taxes, oversaw the maintenance ofroads and waterways, regulated commercial activities and artisan organisations, and exhortedcommoners to exhibit appropriate behaviour” (ibid., p. 53).

A chonin city developed fast and soon it became dominant in some of the most refineddomains of culture. The growing, rich merchant class sponsored the success of local literary andtheatrical production. It was only in the 18th century that Edo managed to catch up with Kyotoand Osaka in the publishing output, and the competition among the three is still fierce.Respected productions of bunraku, kabuki and other theatrical forms make a continuing legacyof that era (Lowe, 1985). In those early times the three main cities were the sites of fiercecompetition, (Nishiyama, 1997), while Osaka often led both in numbers and quality. It producedits own shows and attracted numerous performers to Dotombori area, which maintains itscenturies long reputation for high standard theatres. Performances often spilled into thestreets. Traditional funa norikomi festival still brings famous kabuki actors out, on the boats, to

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Dotonborigawa river, where they announce new Kabukiza and Nakaza programmes. This andsimilar events regularly contribute to the “Osaka character”.

Probably the most interesting example of that urban and urbane need to generate andnurture local pride dates back to the time of construction of the Osaka Castle. Records showhow “… Nobunaga enunciated at Azuchi another tenet of the new castle architecture: thefortress should dazzle with its opulence and aesthetics as well as with its might” (McClean,1999, p. 12).

That flourishing of local culture and the resulting pride can be compared with the amazingexuberance of urban culture in Medieval, Mediterranean Europe, where cities like Siena orDubrovnik fiercely competed to best express their urbanity.

4 Urbanity denied

It is as difficult to define urbanity as it is to spell out what the cities are. Ramage, in his welldocumented Urbanitas, Ancient Sophistication and Refinement, underlines the original essenceof the term: “... a Roman’s urbanity revealed itself in what he said and how he said it” (1973,p.59). Urbanity is usually seen as “a synonym of suavity: a refined politeness or courtesy. Anurbane person is someone who knows his manners. It comes close to civility, derived from theLatin civilitas” (Zijderveld, 1998, p.21). Urbanity is a deeply political phenomenon. We are oftenreminded how the origin of politics is in Greek polis, the archetypal urban settlement of theWest, “the locale where the density, the gravity of discourse was greatest” (Steiner, 1976;Radovic, 1994). Cities are not simply good or bad; dialectics between their positive and negativeaspects contribute equally to an urban profile.

Originating in patterns of speech and behaviour, urbanity features in all fields of humanendeavour with expressive capacity. As we can distinguish urbanity of what one said and howhe said it, we can equally judge the refinement, and indeed the politeness, of what one builds,of how his building relates to its context, or how the street orchestrates the movement etc. InOsaka, its theatres, publishers, bookstores, public projects, residential and job densities, activepublic spaces, governance, passionate aspiration towards beauty, as well as the row andcompetitive energy of the markets and commercial streets, all in their own way contribute tothe potent flow of cultural energy – an truly amazing urbanity.

Yet much of contemporary urban theory would deny the very possibility of urbanity toOsaka! An éclatant example of such thinking is Anton Zijderveld’s Theory of Urbanity. At thevery opening of his treatise Zijderveld makes his position clear (italics are ours): “Urbanity, I shallargue, has been, from its start at the end of Middle Ages in Europe, an economic as well as civicculture, and as such the source of energy and inspiration for Western European democracy – theprime example of a truly civilised society”. He continues how urbanity “is a typically Westernspecies of the genus economic and civic culture. As such it is comparable to and closely relatedwith the Protestant ethic. In fact, both urbanity and the Protestant ethic stood at the cradle ofwestern capitalism and beyond that of Western modernity” (ibid., p.11, our italics).

Therefore, for Anton Zijderveld the Middle Ages were the time when urbanity emerged.The West, within narrowly defined boundaries, was an accurate location of its birth andcontinuing existence. Democracy is a unique and unquestionable political framework ofurbanity, and Protestant religion is the only possible value system of urban culture. Suchdeterminism excludes possibility for urban quality before or after, elsewhere or within differentideo-political contexts. It denies urbanity even to the Urbs itself!

Important for understanding of exclusivist worldview is Zijderveld’s use of the term “trulycivilised society”. It exemplifies his readiness to be an arbiter, the one who defines the rules and

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the one who judges, even the issues as elusive as the truth and culture. At the roots of suchcultural arrogance is a progressist concept of human development. The progress of the “West”,as defined by the “West” is seen as only path for all. The “West” is an unquestionable globalleader, one that provides direction to the Rest (Mahbubani, 2002). Referring to the theories ofZijderveld’s ideological forefather, Max Webber, Schulz rightly emphasises how “one has toquestion how domination rooted in a North American or Western European context can beuseful tools for analysing cities in other cultures” (ibid., p. 284). Webber (correctly!) claimed thatin East Asia the city in European terms does not exist. Zijderveld follows by saying how “thegreat cities of ancient India, ancient China, Babylonia, pre-Columbian Mexico, and Peru mayhave been true cities in the quantitative and morphological sense of the word”, and concludesthat “they lacked distinct economic and civic culture which could have forged their inhabitantsinto specific social bonds, thereby molding them into true citizens as happened in many latemedieval and early modem cities of Europe” (ibid., p.17, our italics).

But, “unlike Europe, Japan was already economically and culturally determined by urbanphenomena from the mid eighteenth century on. At that time the city of Edo was inhabited bymore than one million people … and was therefore the largest city in the world.” (Schulz, 2003,p.285). In 1700 Edo had twice the population of Paris. Edo and other cities of Japan could notbe based on the ideals defined thousands of kilometres to their West (or East). The streets ofOsaka were rich in traditional Japanese theatres and bookstores. The canals of Osaka were builtto both carry goods and express local pride. The lanes and bridges of Osaka were, still are, andalways will be different from those of Protestant Europe – or any other city in the world. Theystem from the cultural substrate of their own city. Similar difference adors souks of Cairo, sois ofBangkok or even sokaks of an distinctly European Sarajevo. Cultural frameworks of those citieswere carved out by different etiquette – and therefore resulted in different urbanity.

Without spending much space on that, here we want to emphasise that those urbanitiesshould not be idealised. Urbanity as city’s cultural energy is “in principle, axiologically neutral”(Zijderveld, p.9). Osaka is a great city, but it also faces a fair share of global and nationalproblems. Some of the local reflections of the crisis are immense. Osaka is the capital of thehomeless of Japan. The city centre was deserted by the majority of its residents. A mizu no toshi– ‘a city on water’, “a city of 808 bridges” (Fiévé, 2003, p.219), has lost almost all of its canals.The economy is far from flourishing. Those are all grave problems, and they add to the citinessof Osaka, to its genuine urban energy – to its urbanity.

The colonial mindset and its theories prove to be unable to grasp the possibility of differenturbanities, of urbanities other than those defined by their own cultural framework. It seemsincomprehensible to that worldview that “what the Romans called urbanitas, life at Rome, theChinese termed chengshi shenghuo, ‘life within the walls and the markets’” (Berque, 1997, p.50), and that we can speak about the corresponding quality and complexity within twodifferent cultures. Here we will not dwell on the roots and reasons behind the colonial doctrinesin urbanism (for a more detailed discussion of that issue see Radovic, 2003). We only want toemphasise how extremely damaging such neo-imperialist positions are, and to support theposition that “imperialism still hurts, still destroys and is reforming itself constantly” (TuhiwaiSmith, 1999, p.19).

5 Need for vagueness and accuracy

In his discussions of the urban, Oswald Spengler wrote about the soul of the town (Spengler,1992, p.90). His vagueness might not help the pragmatists, but it suggests the criticallyimportant, fundamentally undefinable something which makes cities - cities. Spengler’s

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vagueness is pregnant with meaning. It is similar to the thrilling elusiveness and ambiguity ofanother something, proposed by Yukio Mishima. When asked by his guest how to explain thathis house contains “nothing specifically Japanese”, the novelist “smiled and said: “Here, onlywhat you cannot see is Japanese“ (Random, p.14).

Ramage explains how “some of those who have examined urbanitas in one or more of itsmanifestations, failing to recognize that sophistication or refinement is an essence, an aura, asubtle abstraction that makes itself felt in impressions, feelings, and attitudes, have treated it asa specimen that can be slipped under a microscope” (ibid., p.6, our italics) - while it obviouslycould not. He uses an example of the great connoisseur of and the contributor to the Romanurbanity, Cicero, who - when pressed for a definition of the term urbanitas - admits “that hedoes not really know what it is (our italics): ‘I just know that it is a certain [urbanity]’ (ibid.,p.59).”

But, our exclusivist theorists “know”. They come from a cultural tradition accustomed to useknowledge as power for appropriation and domination of cultures other than their own. Thecolonialists mind needs clarity; it seeks the approved “truth” which then provides them withauthority to dominate. They, tragically, fail to be puzzled in front of the phenomenon ofurbanity.

When dealing with complex cultural issues such as urbanity, we must not only be satisfiedwith the vagueness – we must insist on vagueness. At the general level it should be sufficient tosay that urbanity is the cultural energy of the city, the essence of the urban, that it’s meaningsare variable over time and space. It is important to always stress that urbanity is fundamentallyelusive, ambiguous and conditional upon various circumstances. All that is necessary in order toopen space for localisation and contextualisation of the phenomenon. While general definitionsof urbanity must be vague, those which deal with local urbanities can be extremely clear andvery accurate.

As we enter any city and zoom into its spaces and activities, we discover new forces andlayers of difference. Our own project lists multiple places and identities – and, therefore,separate urbanities of Belgrade, Barcelona, Bangkok and Osaka. Is Barcelona Raval; or, is itEixample; or Ribera? Or, isn’t Barcelona, logically, all of them at the same time? Urbanities of allits precincts add up to an exciting synthesis which makes Barcelona one of greatest cities ofEurope. The way urbanity of Barcelona is changing defies cultural exclusivists. (Alas, theurbanity of Raval is so non-European!)

6 Conclusions

Urbanity exists whenever and wherever the cities are. It may take different forms (in the verysame way the cities do), but a city without urbanity is a contradiction in terms. A settlementwithout urbanity cannot be a city. Urbanity is a global concept, yet its ultimate quality developsthrough the innumerable local variations on a key theme.

Our example of Osaka shows a delicate balance between the global, what all cities are, andthe local, kaleidoscopic variations and differences.

We can conclude that:Potentially, there are as many urbanities as there are urban cultures.Urban culture of Osaka is uniquely shaped by the place and the circumstances in which it

grew. As cultural layers of the merchants city were multiplying, Osaka was becomingsimultaneously a city of theatres, a city of shrines and temples, a city of printers and booksellers,a city of the “floating trade”. Global, Japanese, and uniquely Osaka. All those interdependentcultures shaped the distinct spatial and behavioural niches of urbanity, which all constitute the

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totality of today’s Osaka. Urbanity of any city is plural.In Osaka, Midosuji Dori transforms its own citiness through a series of complex variations on

the theme introduced by Hajime Seki. Some very distinct cultures strive along the Midosujispine, and beyond. Those are conceived, lived and can be perceived both in their spatialdefinition and in their rhythms of existence.

Definitions of urbanity at general, global level benefit from vagueness. That level is universal and it has to be broad enough to embrace the difference of the

other. All cities are characterised both by tangible aspects of urbanity and by that invisiblesomething, the soul (absence of which we can feel and essence of which we can not define).Osaka is as much a city as Barcelona, Belgrade or Bangkok are. Its uniqueness is established atthe finer levels of urban life.

Definitions of local levels of urbanity can (and probably must) be very accurate and precise.Those levels are particular; they are culture - place and time - specific. Urbanity pulsates, in

longer and shorter time-frames – in an interaction between the ephemeral events and thelongue durée.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This paper was partly based on the work conducted during my Research Fellowship at the OsakaCity University, in October 2003. I was hosted by Professor Sugiyama Shigekazu. ProfessorAkasaki Kohei generously provided me, from his collection, with the 1929 map of Osaka, part ofwhich I reproduce here as Illustration 1. My two generous young friends, Kyoko and Eiichi,drafted illustration 2.

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